First Day in Japan... and My Birthday!

Posted on 2008/03/23 01:02:39 (March 2008).

[Saturday 15th March]
Our flight landed at Narita at 10AM Japanese time. During the descent we'd been treated to a great view of a snow covered Fuji. I suppose seeing Fuji like this on arrival in Japan is something akin to an English person seeing the white cliffs of Dover. The last time I'd arrived in Japan would have been on return from my final business trip to Seattle and I was treated to an even more spectacular silhouette of Fuji against a sunset - it was genuinely tear jerking. The only downside is that during the descent you're not allowed to use your camera - so you'll just have to take my word for it! (or go and Google for images of Fuji taken from the air taken by other people, presumably not on commercial airliners)

At Narita we hopped on the Narita Express train, which conveniently took us all the way to Ikebukuro, the district of Tokyo where we'd be staying for our first three nights in Japan. We decided to go straight to the hotel and see if they could let us check in a bit early so we could rid ourselves of our baggage.

There was then the business of lunch at hand - the food on the plane had been a bit insubstantial this time, so we were both fairly hungry by now. Luckily we had Internet access in our hotel room (completely standard at no charge in Japan, even in cheap £50 a night hotels like ours - shame on British hotels!). So after a quick bit of research Chie was able to find out there was a branch of Kazuki in Ikebukuro. It'd the ramen shop which also had a branch in Sasazuka - where we used to live in Tokyo - and stood out because it did a vegetarian ramen dish. So that was an obvious choice - cheap, quick, and reassuringly Japanese.

Following that, in the afternoon I decided to have a nap. We'd planned to meet up with friends in the evening and as always having not slept on the plane I didn't think I'd last out otherwise. When I was woken by my alarm at 6:30 I felt absolutely awful, but a quick shower made all the difference.

So in the evening we met up with three of my friends from my previous company, all of whom also came to our wedding - Tanaka-san, Aoki-san and David. The original plan had been to go for dinner at Rohlan, but that seemed to be closed, so instead we went for tempura at a place on the top floor of the Parco department store in Ikebukuro station, where Chie and I had been before a couple of times. It was absolutely fantastic to see these fine chaps again after a year-and-a-bit.

After dinner we then went on to the main venue of the evening - my old favourite Quercus. Therein there were also more happy reunions to be made, with the owner Watanabe-san, plus some of the regulars I used to drink with there, like Ito-san and Sugioka-san (Watanabe-san had told a lot of them I was coming and they made a special visit on my behalf, which was really nice). We also met Sawako-san there, who we'd met on Islay, and had recommended Quercus to. Furthermore we were met there by Haruka-kun, a former Gyosei-ite who had lived near to us in Tokyo and his girlfriend Sayaka-san, and finally Chie's sister came along for the evening too.

Ito-san described it as "John matsuri" - which I guess translates as "John festival" - it was fantastic to see so many familiar faces in one place at the same time.

Of course, as usual I had some great malts there, focusing particularly on some really interesting bottlings of Ichiro's Malt - all the more exciting for the fact that Watanabe-san and me were planning to visit the new Hanyu distillery in Chichibu during this trip to Japan.

It was a lovely evening, and I wish I'd had the stamina to stay up until the early hours, but alas having only slept for a few hours in the afternoon I was ready to go to bed by midnight, and everyone else had to run to catch their last trains.

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